Perceived physical resemblance is presumed to entail shared dispositions and beliefs
Evidence
Abstract familial connection – loosely sharing some traits or characteristics or bordered dispositions – becomes the basis in turn for an abstracted familiarity. This connection is well captured in the extraordinary body of Casta painting spanning eighteenth-century Mexico, those elaborations of early racial classification schemes predicated on miscegenation I discuss in the chapter on “racial latinamericanization” below, some of which explicitly linked racial types to behavioral, emotional, and moral characterizations. That we are alike in physically predicated ways is thought to entail that we are alike in other ways also. We share benefits, and no doubt burdens too, in ways family members are presumed to do. And perhaps we share more than this, an intuitive set of sensibilities and sentiments, sensitivities and resentments, likes and dislikes. The hint of concrete connectivity, however slight, becomes invested with value well beyond what the concrete bonds of connectivity alone can sustain. I can presume to know you because your somehow looking like me on supposedly crucial markers (skin color, hair texture, facial shape, mannerisms, ways of speaking, even dress and the like) suggests also social dispositions and perhaps even beliefs. If intuition is nothing more than educated and habituated guess predicated on a degree of familiarity, I can claim to know you intuitively on the basis of presupposing peculiarly to be like you. Affiliation, however flimsy its social basis or status, conjures in such cases presumptive filiation. Race and nation, racism and nationalism run together in just these bonded ways. Familiality, no matter how abstract and imagined, is supposed, it seems, to conjure familiarity. — David Theo Goldberg, The Threat of Race, 70
Categorization
- DEFINE: Clarifies the mechanism by which imagined affiliation generates claimed intuitive knowledge of strangers — ‘presumptive filiation.’
- XREF: Connects to Casta painting as a visual taxonomy of race; pairs with the later chapter on ‘racial latinamericanization’ the author flags. — connects to: Perceived physical resemblance licenses presumptive knowledge of others’ inner lives — David Theo Goldberg, The Threat of Race: Reflections on…, 70; Physically attractive people are judged superior on unrelated personality and character dimensions — Anthony G. Greenwald and Mahzarin R. Banaji, Implicit Social Cognition: Attitudes,…, 91